Good teams win ugly.
It’s a saying you’ll hear a lot in footy. In terms of this game, it was a fitting saying, as ‘ugly’ has never been a more apt way to describe a game of footy as it was to describe the Crows versus Giants clash at the Adelaide Oval.
The pressure was up, the skills were down, and the wind played havoc with the effectiveness of many of the players, but footy is a game played in the elements, and when you’re confronted with average conditions, the team that goes harder for longer is usually the team that emerges victorious.
And after two losses to the Cats and Suns, this was exactly the type of win the Crows needed. Hard, tough, and against high-quality opposition, they knuckled down, cracked in hard, and owned the footy.
Sadly, they were unable to capitalise on their territory dominance in the first half, but with GWS unable to impact the scoreboard – four goals in four quarters is not beating anyone – the Crows were able to take the big games of Lachie Whitfield (39 touches), Tom Green (35), and Lachie Ash (29) and do more, with less.
For me, it was the worker bees of the Adelaide Crows that were the standouts in this game. Alex Neal-Bullen, Mitch Hinge, and Ben Keays made big plays, whilst the Adelaide back six, out-performed statistically by their GWS counterparts (and talked up far less than them by the commentary team) were able to successfully repel almost all of the Giants’ forward forays.
They get so little love – I reckon it’s my job to give them some.
Let’s jump into the Good, Bad, and Ugly of this one… and I’ll try hard not to focus too much on the ugly.
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